Innovation in Controls

This weekend our team competed at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with 50+ other teams. During the competition we were awarded the innovation in Controls award! This award honors a team that created the most innovative programming and electronics techniques.

Our programming team decided to make bold choices in code that worked! Here's the highlights of the most innovative aspects of our code:

• We developed our own API to automatically generate code for the pre-programmed portion of the match at the beginning. This saved us a lot of time and allowed us great flexibility in being able to start from anywhere on the field.

• We switched to a QMK(Quantum mechanical keyboard) panel to control the operations on our robot. We originally thought this was going to be very difficult, because other teams have coded a complex python script to translate the QMK into an understandable device. Upon further investigation, however, we found we could configure the QMK to believe it was a joystick with buttons, so drivers' station accepted the buttons perfectly.

This year a big focus for us was organization of our electronics panel. Through experimenting with different cable management types, 3D printed mounts, and different products to secure, we nailed down the perfect system that had zero failures after completion. Here's some key features of our electronics panel:

• 3D printed wire management

• Epoxy on permanently mounted fixtures

• Loctite on non-permanent mounts

• A clear belly pan to easily diagnose issues

We are, however, looking for programmers and electricians! If you have experience in programming for robots, programming in Java, or electronics, please consider contacting us to get involved with mentorship on the team!